City Under the Moon (17 page)

“Jaguar, ma’am.” He was a sturdy black man in his late twenties. Dead serious.

“Mantle,” said the third pilot. His big ginger head looked like a lollipop on his thin frame.

“These men are fully briefed and under your command,” said Fasolo. “There will be a UN and Romanian attaché awaiting your arrival.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Tildascow and the pilots saluted, and the general left. Lon felt better immediately; he was his own worst enemy and didn’t need any goddamn help.

Mantle whistled, looking Lon up and down. “Wowee,” he said with a thick drawl, “the Aurora is gonna take a bite outta you.” He was probably 25, the youngest of the three, and wore a perma-grin like he was always thinking of a joke at your expense.

“Shut up, Mantle,” said Beethoven, the team leader. The dusting of grey in his auburn hair made him look wise.

“’S’what we call counterproductive,” added Jaguar as he smacked Mantle on the back of the head.

Lon looked up at the aircraft and his stomach tumbled.

***

The pilots helped them into “multilayer anti-G flight gear,” costumes that reminded Lon of spacesuits, which would send magnetic pulses over key arteries to keep their circulation going. This was on top of painfully tight undergarments designed to keep their blood from pooling in the lower half of their bodies.

Fantastic. Lon didn’t want his blood to pool.

Once he was suited up, a tech directed Lon onto a portable ramp, which shook with each step he took. It terminated above the tight, two-man cockpit of the Aurora, and Lon was suddenly struck with claustrophobia on top of everything else. He turned to flee, but the tech was blocking his escape route.

Mantle flashed his crooked smile from the front seat of the cockpit. “Come on, buddy. Seat’s all warm.”

And there was Tildascow, in her own spacesuit, on her own ramp, nodding at him again. Like a reassuring cult leader about to rape him.

“Whatcha got here is the SR-105 Aurora, top-secret smartplane that cost y’all about fifteen billion dollars in taxes. Polyorganic exterior is retro-engineered from spider’s web to make it, oh, ‘bout a thousand times stronger than steel. Ain’t that cool?”

Lon jerked when the tech put his hand on his shoulder and directed him where to step. Deep breath.

“AI steers the craft using GPS,” Mantle said in the nonchalant tone of a flight attendant. “So I don’t have to do much, which is good because it’s awfully tough not to black out at this speed. We’ll be travellin’ just under Mach 8 today, almost double the non-classified airspeed record. Although we’ll be above the atmosphere, so technically this here is a spacecraft and you will be an astronaut.”

The tech assisted Lon as he tried to negotiate the steep—

Well, he fell into the plane.

“Y’okay?” asked Mantle.

Lon hated Mantle too much to answer him.

The tech went prone to lean over and help Lon with his helmet, a two-part assembly with a breathing regulator.

Now Mantle’s voice came through a speaker. “The hypersonic propulsion thrusters use nuclear pulse projection, which means tiny atomic bombs are this puppy’s fuel—“

“Could we stop talking?” Lon asked.

“Give the kid a break,” said Beethoven over the radio.

But Lon didn’t hear Mantle’s response, because his heart went into his throat when the tech produced a syringe.

“I-don’t-need-that-why-would-I-need-that!”

“You need an IV. Won’t hurt at all.” The tech ripped open a Velcro double-flap panel on the inner elbow of Lon’s flight suit. The cold swab of alcohol made him feel pukey, but his arm was trapped in the shape of the seat. An IV port with two bags of clear liquid was built into the side of the cockpit.

“No, but no—Fuck!”

But the tech stuck him anyway. None of these fucking people ever listened! Lon’s legs quivered as the tech taped down the needle and closed the flap. The pulling in his skin made him burp vomit.

Mantle stood up and leaned over the back of his seat to demonstrate as he inserted his own IV. “This’ll keep you hydrated and help you relax. Pressure will be
wowee
intense. We’re gonna be movin’ almost three times the speed of a bullet. You could lose five pounds during this here flight. ”

Pills, IVs… Were these yutzes military or were they pharmacists?

Lon looked around, wondering if he could still escape from this mess. Tildascow waved at him from the cockpit of the next Aurora. Christ, it felt like she was stalking him. And he was trapped against his will, all
Clockwork Orange
—

“Hey… How old do you think I am?” Mantle asked.

“I don’t know,” Lon whimpered. “How old are you?”

“Almost 28. I look younger than I am, right? Youngest Shadow Stalker pilot they’s ever been.” He slapped the Shadow Stalkers patch on his sleeve. The emblem featured a gryphon (body of a lion, head and wings of an eagle) pointing a glowing sword toward a crescent moon. Symbological cross-pollination, Lon thought. Bizarre and uninformed.

These people have no idea what they’re doing!

Mantle settled in his seat as the motorized platform wheeled away. Lon’s seat jolted forward—
FUCK!
—and locked into place.

The aircraft’s vibration increased, like a snake hissing before it unleashed. Well maybe he didn’t want it to unleash while he was inside of it!

Oh man, oh no.

The plane lurched forward with a rising electronic hum. Cross-chatter on the headset told them various systems were ready. They were clear for taxi. Mantle gave a thumbs-up to someone on the ground.

“You ain’t afraid of heights, are you?” Mantle chuckled.

“No.”

“Then we’ll have no problemo, jalapeño.”

“I’m afraid of pain.”

“Oh. Well, this
is
gonna hurt.”

As the Auroras taxied to the runway, the Andrews Control Tower released a concentrated electromagnetic pulse toward the sky to interrupt satellite photography.

The nuclear pulse engines roared to life, and Lon was thrown against his seat. A series of escalating booms crashed from somewhere beyond the confines of his deafening mask. His body vibrated into numbness.

Suddenly, he felt sleepy.

The three planes launched eastward over the Atlantic, quaking the sky.

Six

Situation Room

9:25 a.m.

President Weston watched constant updates on CNN.

Cellphone cameras had the mayhem covered like the Super Bowl. His old-fashioned sensibilities wanted the media to show some restraint with the hyper-violent imagery, but wishful thinking didn’t mix with politics. The broadcast networks had blown past their standards, the FCC be damned, and all but the most obscure cable channels had been pre-empted for wall-to-wall werewolves. Reporters had already been killed, but the rest just kept up the charge. The police were having as much trouble wrangling the press as they were the creatures.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Alan Truesdale, National Security Advisor Rebekkah Luft, and White House Chief of Staff Teddy Harrison were at the president’s side. It felt like the entire world was watching over their shoulders.

With no warning, MSNBC broadcast a stomach-churning shot of a werewolf ripping out a woman’s guts as her two children shrieked in horror.

Teddy rubbed his temples. “We should consider blocking transmissions from the island,” he muttered, somewhere between question and statement.

“Not yet,” said Truesdale. “Let them see. The liberals can’t complain if they don’t want these monsters in their backyards.”

Weston couldn’t disagree.

“And it will justify whatever we have to do,” Truesdale added. “Later.”

Weston nodded.
Later
was too foreboding a concept to dwell on at the moment. “It’s a step we may want to take at some point. What are we doing about the injuries from last night, the ones who may be infected?”

“Locking them up,” said Truesdale. “Hospital rooms. Police stations. We’re requisitioning hotel rooms. We have the upper floors of One Times Square. We’re also looking at clearing some space at Riker’s Island.”

“Can we be sure they’re all accounted for?”

Truesdale’s solemn eyes turned toward him.
Of course not.

“There are so many,” Luft thought out loud. “Scared and confused, in denial, maybe injured badly or even unconscious.”

“We’ll be more prepared tonight,” Teddy said half-heartedly.

“We have to consider worst-case scenarios,” said Truesdale.

Weston diverted his gaze as more violence unfolded on TV. “Draw up some options.”

Seven

CDC Observation Room

January 1

11:25 a.m.

Jessica Tanner and her expanding team had worked through the night.

Everyone but the janitors had been diverted to lycanthropy study. Experts recruited by the Department of Health and Human Services were steadily arriving by helicopter, and each of them brought their own mini-teams of colleagues and assistants: more lungs taking up air, more stray bottles of water, more shuffling papers. And their collective data was regularly being uploaded to a WHO server for the worldwide think tank. The more brains the better, but their in-house team had been siphoned into so many teleconferences that the collective was losing touch with the latest empirical data (which in the past hour had been a report on the virus’ effect on certain hormones and glands). Every report brought the same conclusion: No one had ever seen anything like this, not outside of movies or nightmares.

The herd crowded into the observation room just before 11:10 a.m., officially-predicted moonset in Atlanta. As they waited, observing their captive werewolf through the two-way mirror, the stink of coffee breath grew so powerful that Jessica thought she might have to run back to the bathroom.

Within minutes, the werewolf lost consciousness. Its heart rate dropped, breathing slowed, and the lupine physical characteristics regressed. The reverse transformation lasted just over a minute, and then they were once again left with the fragile Dr. Melissa Kenzie.

“H-1 interval was six minutes, thirty seconds,” Richard said, reviewing data over the shoulder of a CDC analyst. “A full minute less than we recorded during our first study cycle last night.”

“Was the H-1 interval the only inconsistency?” asked Dr. Diana Benrubi, Director for Biodefense at the University of Texas Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases.

“Not at all,” said a CDC analyst, directing them to a monitor with side-by-side images of the Kenzie werewolf’s two transformations. “Look at this.”

To the naked eye, the lycanthropic effect was more pronounced during their second study of the cycle. Kenzie the werewolf’s ears had grown bigger, her maxilla stretched into the beginnings of a canine snout and her fangs extended further. Her neck had also bulged wider, toward broader shoulders.

“Higher moonlight intensity, more transformation,” noted an uptight female virologist from the Viral Diseases Division at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Jessica had already forgotten her name twice. “Makes you wonder how far it can go.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Richard sniped. He’d been steadily losing patience all night as lycanthropy evaded their diagnoses. “There’s no such thing as ‘moonlight.’ It’s sunlight reflected off the moon. Why aren’t they transformed by sunlight?”

“We’re working on that,” replied a hotshot physicist from Yale, Timothy something-or-other. “The moon absorbs selected elements of the spectrum, so the characteristics of moonlight aren’t quite the same as sunlight. We’ve been testing the spectral response of the virus, but we haven’t been able to find the precise ratios that catalyze the transformation.”

“If we find that wavelength, could we block it with sunscreen?” asked a Korean man from WRAIR’s Retrovirology Division.

Thus began another lap on the track they’d circled all night long. Bright minds tossing out bright ideas, all of which fell into one of two categories: things they’d already tried or things they couldn’t try.

“Solid walls can’t even block it,” Jessica said. “She transformed in the containment room, and those walls are reinforced with 55 millimeters of lead to block nine hundred kilovolts of x-rays.”

Next they asked about polarization, or strobing another light source to interrupt the light of the moon. Good theories, but absurd in practicality. A dog whistle … of course they’d tested it, to no effect. Weiko Tsong, Richard’s old friend from USAMRIID’s Department of Vector Assessment, Virology Division, suggested applied lethal mutagenesis, a dangerously irresponsible technology that they couldn’t begin to implement in time. Although Richard made her laugh by suggesting that might turn them into weretyrannosaurs.

Someone mentioned Ribavirin. Another asked about comparing antibodies from either phase of the transformation. Tried, useless. The woman from WRAIR suggested attaching something to the virus, a target the white blood cells could track, but the virus’ rapid and massively error-prone replication would leave the WBCs chasing its fecal matter.

“My God, have we checked the host vectors?” asked Dr. Lisa Rohr, one of Richard’s virologists. “What if it infects rats or mosquitoes?”

And then, as usual, the conversation devolved into trampling voices as fear conquered reason. These roundtables were just sped-up, melodramatic versions of the same Abbott and Costello routines she’d endured at her conferences.
Who’s on first? What’s on second? How can a virus do these things—third base!

“It just—it does things it’s not supposed to do,” Rohr complained, right on schedule. “Things it
can’t
do.”

Having come to this conclusion herself, and observing everyone else arriving at their own pace, Jessica was left with only one explanation—one she probably wouldn’t have blurted in such distinguished company had she not been so damn tired.

“It may just be what the movies say it is. Supernatural.”

The word hung in the room.
Supernatural
. A sacrilege.

Richard scowled at her, as if she’d committed treason. “So, what, we should put out a call for witches and exorcists? This is not magic, this is a
virus
; a biological entity we can quantify, study and attack. It’s ahead of us, but we’ll catch it.”